The Supreme Court on Tuesday added three new cases to its oral argument docket for the 2026-27 term, agreeing to decide, among other things, what kinds of orders trial courts can issue in disputes over access to government information and whether working as a cook in a camp run by violent separatists qualifies as providing “material support” for terrorism under federal immigration law.
President Donald Trump created the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, in January 2025 to advance his agenda by “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” Although it is not a cabinet-level department, DOGE was widely involved in Trump’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal government.
The dispute now before the court, U.S. Doge Service v. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, began after a government watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, filed a request under FOIA for (among other things) communications between the DOGE administrator, Amy Gleason, and DOGE staff, as well as financial disclosures submitted by DOGE personnel.
CREW went to federal court in Washington last year, asking DOGE to disclose documents that it said it wanted before Congress passed a bill to fund the federal government.
CREW also sought to fast-track discovery – the process of exchanging information in litigation – to determine whether DOGE is a federal “agency” that must comply with FOIA. It asked for a list of current and former DOGE employees, a list of employees and positions for which DOGE had recommended termination, a list of government contracts and grants that DOGE had recommended be canceled, and the opportunity to depose Gleason.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper granted most of CREW’s discovery requests, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit turned down DOGE’s plea to pause that order.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer then came to the Supreme Court in May 2025, asking the justices to intervene. He told the justices that the discovery required under Cooper’s order “offends the separation of powers by compromising the ‘necessity’ for confidentiality that allows presidential advisors to provide ‘candid, objective’ advice and communication.”
In a two-page, unsigned order in early June 2025, the court – over the objections of Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson – sent the dispute back to the D.C. Circuit for another look. The majority wrote that the portions of Cooper’s discovery order that required the government to disclose the content of DOGE’s recommendations within the executive branch, as well as whether those recommendations were followed, were too broad. Moreover, it added, concerns about the separation of powers between the branches of government “counsel judicial deference and restraint in the context of discovery regarding internal Executive Branch communications.” The court put Cooper’s discovery orders on hold while the litigation continued.
When the case returned to the lower courts, CREW modified its discovery requests so that it no longer sought information about “recommendations” made by U.S. DOGE employees. The lower courts then declined to block CREW’s requests.
DOGE came to the Supreme Court in March, asking the justices to weigh in. Sauer told the court that the D.C. Circuit “has continued to approve intrusive discovery against a presidential advisory body without adequate consideration for the separation of powers, the FOIA statute, and” the Supreme Court’s order last year on the interim docket. Among other things, he argued, that order “required the courts below to reassess all remaining discovery—not just requests for USDS recommendations—with the ‘deference and restraint’ applicable to presidential advisors under Cheney v. U.S. District Court,” a 2004 case in which the justices held that when considering requests for information directed at the vice-president and other senior executive branch officials, “special considerations” should “control when the Executive Branch’s interests in maintaining the autonomy of its office and safeguarding the confidentiality of its communications are implicated.”
CREW urged the justices to deny review. It argued that in formulating the new discovery order, the D.C. Circuit had “followed this Court’s instructions” in its earlier ruling on the interim docket “to the letter.” Instead, it contended, the government was seeking “to transform this Court’s carefully crafted stay-stage order into a sweeping ruling that Cheney effectively forecloses discovery in this case. That is not what this Court said,” CREW insisted, “and, especially after remand, this case looks nothing like Cheney.”
On Tuesday, the court agreed to address the D.C. Circuit’s ruling.
The immigration case granted on Tuesday, Blanche v. Ozurumba, was also brought to the court by the Trump administration. In a petition for review filed in May, Sauer asked the justices to clarify what type of support an immigrant must be shown to have provided to a terrorist organization in order to be “removable and ineligible for various immigration benefits” under a federal immigration law that states that an individual who “affords material support” to such a group is “ineligible to be admitted to the United States.”
Blanche v. Ozurumba involves Izuchukwu Ozurumba, “a native and citizen of Nigeria,” who worked as a cook in a camp run by a separatist organization known as the “Unknown Gunmen” “for about six months” before escaping, according to the government’s petition. He made his way to Venezuela and then the United States, where he applied for asylum, but an immigration judge and then the Board of Immigration Appeals concluded that his work in the camp amounted to “material support” for terrorism and that he was, therefore, ineligible for asylum.
Ozurumba appealed his case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which held that “the record does not support the conclusion that Ozurumba provided material support” to the Unknown Gunmen. “Cooking meals using food and supplies purchased by the organization may have ‘sustained’ the organization in the broadest possible sense—by converting raw groceries into meals they enjoyed—but provided nothing that the organization could use or readily divert to plan or carry out its terrorist activities,” concluded 4th Circuit Judge James Wynn in the majority opinion.
The Supreme Court will now decide whether the work done for a terrorist organization must “advance the organization’s actual commission of terrorism” to qualify as “material support.”
The justices also granted review on Tuesday in Berry v. United States, on whether a certificate of appealability may be granted to a prisoner whose claim is foreclosed by his own circuit’s precedent but would be allowed to proceed in a different circuit. In his petition for review, Corey Berry emphasized that the federal courts of appeals were split over this question on circuit splits.
